It may be like a grown-up version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, with our narrator chomping her way through free Caribbean holidays, yacht jaunts and Bulgari watches, never satisfying her ravenous greed. Or it may be more like Cinderella, with the wide-eyed girl in rags being swept up by Prince Charming and suddenly transformed into one of the most important people in the land. Whatever guise Cherie Blair's memoirs take, we'll want to read them.

David Blunkett, Alastair Campbell and Oona King have given their take on the Blair years. But Blunkett is too boring, Campbell too wily and King too nice to portray Blair's reign in its Technicolor glory. Cherie's anger, greed, recklessness, the very flaws that turned off the British public, will fuel her to write a no-holds-barred depiction of Tony Blair's reign.

The woman who could not resist mouthing 'liar' in public about the man who is now PM or end her relationship with hacks on a sarky note ('we won't miss you') will find it impossible to censor her views, especially when she's being paid a great deal of money not to do so.

So Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell, Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson - fasten your seatbelts, because this is going to be a bumpy ride. It's payback time. Plus, we'll get some more on Carole Caplin, Peter Foster, the Queen, not to mention Sir Cliff.

But that's the icing on the cake. What this articulate lawyer, who for 10 years has been muzzled, can finally do is explain how politics can go so wrong. How someone as lovable (the Blairs' mutual devotion is a leitmotif of Campbell's diaries) and popular (in 1997, that is) as Tony Blair could fail to deliver on so many promises.

For Cherie the principled Labour voter, feminist and human-rights champion, her husband's political blunders in the areas of civil rights, Iraq, equal pay, child care and better education must be painful. What, or whom, does she blame for the lost opportunity to change the world for the better?

It is ironic, given Tony Blair's reliance on and manipulation of the media, that his wife should have suffered so much at their hands. Now she has the chance to set the record straight, Cherie may also raise the alarm on the huge potential for media abuse, delivering a 'J'accuse' to those who tried to get her father and her half-sister to dish the dirt or hinted at sleaze where there was none.

Anyone who watched Cherie take centre-stage after the Peter Foster scandal, in which the conman helped her buy two flats in Bristol, could see she was burning to speak out. Cherie, the speech made clear, sees herself as a vulnerable juggler whose mistakes entertain a cruel audience. With her memoirs, she can show that the audience makes mistakes too. And that she was the best first lady we never loved.

The first red army

Jane Portal, curator of the British Museum's exhibition, The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, first saw the 2,000-year-old lifesize figures in 1979. Nearly 30 later, she has brought a group of the soldiers, entertainers, horses and carriages that guarded the emperor's tomb to the museum.

Qin Shihuang conscripted 700,000 men to craft the figures; each one bore the name of its maker, so that any mistake could be easily rectified - and their perpetrator punished. Appropriately, given this exploitation of labourers, the exhibit takes over the museum's Reading Room, where Karl Marx used to write.

As staff prepared for the Prime Minister's visit the evening before its official opening, they wondered if Gordon Brown would make an allusion to Marx. Instead,he went up to two terracotta bureaucrats, with their hands clasped under sleeves to show they were not workers. 'At least they're not faceless,' he laughed. Not in China, they're not.